Refinement
by offermyheart
Summary: Not every story is one of mayhem and chaos; not every character needs to be fixed. Albus Potter finds that Isobel Wayland lies somewhere in-between propriety and unrest, spun up by a web of post-war bids for power and influence. While she may need to be broken down to build herself back up again, he just might need to be built back up too.
1. A Truth Not-So Universally Acknowledged

Refinement by offermyheart

Disclaimer: Everything is attributed to J. K. Rowling.

* * *

 _"The process of discovering your fearless self is of refinement." —Steve Maraboli_

* * *

I: A Truth Not-So Universally Acknowledged

To most returning Hogwarts students, the first week of each new school year was reserved for catching up with dorm mates and getting used to their new schedules. As though moved by a shift in the air or a spark against worn granite, old friends relayed tales of summer visits to Irish moors or sightseeing in Vienna.

In Isobel Wayland's mind, the first week back was always the worst. Her first year, that shift in the air even had her eyes widening at the way Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry seemed to welcome you home in a way that made that spark of light against granite seem realistic as well. There was even a friend thrown in at one point.

She soon realized that the stagnant flow of her life would eventually find a way back in. Now, she was determined to focus. No imaginary notions of air or romanticism of sparks in the Hogwarts air (most likely the result of someone using a _Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes_ product, no doubt) would move her line of sight from her textbooks. Unless, of course, this "shift" in the air was the smell of dinner shifting to dessert.

In any other case, she had her agenda: Get in, get educated, get out.

Her own silence was her way of knowing that there were others that felt similarly. Maybe not quite the same, but similar.

Which is how she found herself saying, _fuck it_ , and sneaking out of the Slytherin dungeons at one in the morning on a Sunday night on an impromptu visit to the library.

That one track mind was _not_ , however, the cause of her accidentally walking into Albus Potter at one o'clock in the morning.

As she not-so gracefully fell, her eyes led up his tall frame. In the natural stillness of night, he was a formidable figure, lit only by the combined candent glow of their two wands. She imagined he would make a decent extra on a movie set, listed in the credits as "Creepy Guy Setting the Creepy Setting in a Creepy Alleyway."

"Shit, sorry!" He cursed, bending down to help her back up by instinct. "Didn't think anyone else would be out this late on a Sunday."

Isobel was silent.

In the back of her mind, she dully noted that it was now technically Monday.

"Er... I'll just leave you to it, then?" He continued, offering a small upturn of his lips, a deep rosy color in the glow of their magic.

Before she could get a word out, the harsh light of another wand joined them.

"Oi, what's this?"

Albus groaned as the two seventh year students turned to face Professor Merimac, the greying Arithmancy instructor. She stayed silent, eyeing the fading hair dye around his temples. She briefly wondered if he forgot to touch it up in the last few weeks or simply stopped caring with old age.

Albus, on the other hand, ran the hand that wasn't holding his wand through the ever-messy jet black mop on his head. "Sleep walking?" He offered, lips still upturned in what seemed to contribute to natural charisma, rather than nerves.

Merimac was not impressed, Isobel thought, looking between Albus and the professor, still struck silent by the situation.

"Detention, both of you. Every night this week," Merimac's own slight figure deadpanned at the two students, leaving no room for argument.

This time, both Albus and Isobel's eyes widened, although Albus was still the one that spoke. "The entire _week_?" He said evenly, trying to keep the annoyance from his tone, though Isobel could see from her close proximity how his jaw had set, defining the bones in his side profile. _Ramus_ , she identified, eyeing the straight line setting his features into a frown. She expected Merimac hadn't noticed, the thought flicking through her mind, in and out like a light.

The professor arched one dark brow, still expressionless. The similarity in color between his rich, dark skin and his blackened brows made it almost as hard to notice the professor's expression as the grit of Albus's teeth.

"I could make it two, if that bothers you, Mr. Potter," he said in his own even tone.

"I think we're fine, Professor. We'll just be on our way to bed now, got classes in the morning," Albus replied as he grabbed his housemate's forearm and turned in the opposite direction, hasty to escape the potential additional days mopping floors or cleaning loos to their sentencing.

As they made their escape, sans dismissal, Isobel thought she heard Professor Merimac sigh and mutter something under his breath. She decided she didn't want to know what. After three years in his class, she had heard (and even learned) some quite colorful language in his classroom.

After passing through two low-lit corridors, she murmured a single syllable: "Arm."

Albus stopped his brisk brisk pace, leading her to quit walking as well. "Sorry?"

"My arm," she repeated just as quietly, her flickering brown eyes meeting his own emerald green gaze.

"Oh, sorry Iz," he remarked, letting go of her and, sensing her discomfort, decided to take a small step to the left. "So... Detention. That sucks."

"Sucks," she nodded. _Iz?_

"That could've gone worse though," he continued, clearly in a mood that required some sort of noise to fill the outward silence. "I think us being housemates all these years must've rubbed off on me by now. You've always seemed like you're a million miles away - not that that's a bad thing. More sensible than not, really. Then you're there and Merimac's muttering under his breath about how you can not listen to a word he says and know all the answers. Merlin knows I usually talk my own head off and I never know what's going on, especially in Arithmancy. Only there for the O.W.L., honestly. Mum would've killed me if I started off the term with two weeks of detention, not that one week won't set her off. Sorry for running into you though, literally. It'd probably just be me that got caught yammering to a portrait or something if I hadn't," he rambled.

 _Iz.._. It'd been five years since she'd heard him call her by that name, Isobel noted inwardly, trying and failing to keep up with the subject changes he went through every five seconds. She'd long ago learned that Albus Potter's reputation at Hogwarts was defined by few defining traits: his striking resemblance to his father, his friendship with Scorpius Malfoy, son of a former Death Eater (although the shock of that had dimmed over the years), and the charisma that seemed natural to him and a metaphorical type of magnet to everyone around him. In this moment, as Albus rambled on about the wheels turning in his mind, she questioned Sera McClaire's own ramblings of his way with words that Isobel had long ago learned to tune out.

Sera, while harmless, liked to have these conversations from her bed a few measly feet away from Isobel's. She now wondered if Sera McClaire had ever actually spoken to Albus Potter.

She nodded to him as he stopped speaking and ran his hand through his hair as she started walking again, her pace brisk and her strides long as the pair wound through four more corridors of silence.


	2. Be Not Afraid of Greatness

Refinement by offermyheart

Disclaimer: Everything is attributed to J.K. Rowling.

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II: Be Not Afraid of Greatness

The more she thought about him, the less sense he made, and Isobel Wayland was hardly ever caught doing much else. Thinking, that is, _not_ trying to undo the laces that bound Albus Severus Potter together into Hogwarts's golden boy. That was an idea she left behind with the trainers she grew out of first year.

She was sat in the Great Hall, her thrifted and well worn edition of _William Shakespeare: Complete Plays_ open on the wooden table sitting beside her plate of toast and her attention flitting back and forth from the staring competition that seemed to be happening between a certain green-eyed boy and one of his cousin's caught in a sea of red across the hall.

To be entirely truthful, she hadn't flipped a single page in her book since having sat down and buttered her toast nearly ten minutes ago.

While Isobel always considered herself to be a particularly observant person, she had never found any reason to memorize the names of every Weasley, Potter, and whoever else that everyone else seemed to know and love. It was practicality, really; why would she ever need to know their names when she went back to Wales?

Even if she had friends she knew and liked well enough to visit after Hogwarts, and if she found work somewhere she could afford to take any kind of holiday, Scotland and England would hardly be her first choices.

By the time she realized she had spent far too long staring to be considered polite or, more importantly, as uncaring as she ought to be (whether or not she was putting any thought into the staring, rather than ideal holiday locations), Albus's sights set onto her. Her face turning the same color as the bright red of Weasley hair, she looked down at her book and stared fixedly at the page.

"Ready to go?"

Closing her book and making her best attempt at acting like she hadn't just been caught staring at him, Isobel shoved the thick novel into her bag and nodded at Albus, quickly following him out of the Great Hall.

On Monday night, he had found her and seemingly decided that they may as well walk together to detention. The next night, he did the same, and now, walking to the trophy room for their last night of punishment, she realized she had been expecting him.

Perhaps it was the trick of the lights flickering from the ceiling, but she could've sworn he wore a smirk on his face as he was walking. If the color of her cheeks weren't obvious enough, she might've turned to him and checked to see.

* * *

"Benedict Atticus Card," Albus read off, peering into the dusty depths of some long-forgotten scholastic achievement award. "Poor man must've worked himself to death to get away from that name and they couldn't even give him a bigger trophy."

"Your name is Albus," Isobel muttered without thinking, pinking up again the moment the words left her lips. "I, uh, didn't mean to—"

To her surprise, he laughed, the sound seeming to bounce off the gold trinkets and plaques lining the walls like the echoes of a song in an empty room. "No, you're right. My little sister and I have a theory that mum was drunk when her and dad named me: celebratory post-childbirth drinks. James said she was hit by a shooting star, and he should know since he was there, but he's always been an arse. Could be worse though, could've named me Benedict."

She sneaked a glance his way, jolted by what seemed like a pretty lengthy and personal remark after spending the first half hour of shining and scrubbing in silence. Especially coming from someone she hadn't spoken to in years before this very week, and more especially coming from someone who was known for (as Sera McClaire would've put it) his 'bad boy charm.'

" _It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves_ ," she quoted, thinking of the singular line she managed to take in from the page she had read only less than an hour ago.

" _Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them_ ," Albus countered in a tone Isobel thought he meant to reflect the same attitude as having a name like Benedict Atticus Card.

At the stunned look on her face, he smiled that nearly unnoticeable smirk he usually wore that almost seemed to say, _I_ _'ll tell you a secret, but it'll cost you_. One that reminded her of the look he wore on his face when he caught her staring. "You usually go around flinging Shakespeare into modern-day conversation, or is it because you were reading _Hamlet_ earlier? Personally, I would've thought you'd be more partial to the sonnets, Iz."

"Do you usually go around judging what others are or are not reading and thinking of counter-quotes?" She replied absently, avoiding the gaze she now felt on her back.

"My vocabulary's grown a bit since first year, thank you very much," he said cheekily, smirk still in place, surely. "Actually, Teddy — my other brother, kinda, you remember him? He's one of those cultured types, always used to walk around in his boxers whispering what he was reading out loud. Some of it stuck," he chuckled fondly as he wiped a spiderweb from a crack between a wall and the shelf he had just finished cleaning.

If someone had told eleven year-old Isobel Catharine Marie Wayland that she would one day be in detention with Albus Severus Potter on a Friday night, pretentiously quoting Shakespeare and coughing up dust in an atmosphere that reflected friendliness and ease, she would have never believed it.

She wondered what Teddy Lupin, who she remembered occasionally seeing in the halls during his days at Hogwarts, would look like reading Shakespeare in his boxers with vivid blue hair.

"Was it only Shakespeare he read aloud in his boxers, or was there anyone else I might've heard of?"


	3. I Knew It Might Burn

Refinement by offermyheart

Disclaimer: Everything is attributed to J.K. Rowling.

* * *

III: I Knew It Might Burn...

It isn't until you feel your heart breaking for the loss of yourself that you realize the tragedy of living: that the moment you let yourself turn hard and cold, you give in. That if you don't even let yourself hope, if you never even try, you may as well give up.

According to Amadeus Wayland, Isobel's father and mentor in all ways that she had ever thought mattered, there are two roads in life for everyone. We either die trying or never try.

She used to think she fell into the first category, back when her father truly was her mentor and she figured that passion outweighed the voices of doubt in your own head and, more importantly, having a last name that made people whisper about you on the street.

Then she realized the truth, not only about her father, but about herself. About the voices of doubt that likely plagued most people, other than the ones that probably never had to think about such things. People like Albus Severus Potter.

Still, there was a part of her, a dwindling ember of hope, one that she kept hidden in the darkest parts of her mind. A part of her that burned for more, a part of her that made it feel as if her own heart may swallow her up whole, if she let it.

* * *

Isobel and Albus were never truly friends, not in the sense that they told each other their secrets and knew each other's favorite foods. They met through a mutual friend, a girl named Cornelia Bolero. With a name like that, how could anyone not want to be friends with her?

Despite the swagger Albus was known to portray hardly any effort, even he secretly used to write his mum and dad nearly every day as a first year student at a strange boarding school, miles away from home. Isobel did too. Even Cornelia, although she'd probably never admit it. That is, if she could.

Eleven-year old Cornelia Bolero wore her hair up in a high ponytail everyday. No strays, with a miniature can of hairspray always on hand in her schoolbag. She wore bright colored shoes to contrast the neutrality of the school uniform and laughed loud enough for anyone within a hallway's distance to hear and know it was her.

One spring day that year, Albus kissed her in the shadows beneath the staircase that led from the fourth to the fifth floor (or was it rotating around to reach the stairway that connected to the sixth?) and her laughter echoed from both floors.

Three months later, Cornelia went missing during summer break and Albus knew the real reason why she never replied to any of his letters. Because she couldn't. At least, that's what he told himself.

* * *

It was late Friday night, the last of their assigned detentions, when Albus finally built up the nerve to say what he'd been meaning to ask for the last five years (not that he'd ever admit it).

"Why didn't you write to me?"

It took her a moment for Isobel to respond. "...What?" She let out, seemingly and truly lost.

She noticed that seemed to be a habit of his, at least around her, and as a change in character from when they were eleven. Both his tolerance for silence while working, as well as his intolerance for not speaking when there's something on his mind.

"After Cornelia. Why didn't you write?" He turned to face her, his brows slightly scrunching closer as he elaborated.

Isobel wondered when he had grown so tall.

He let out a breath, one she felt she had let out herself from the weight it seemed to hold over him. "We were friends," he continued, "We were. I know Scorp made you... nervous, but you and me, we could've... talked. After. Gotten through it together. So, I guess I'm really asking why you wrote me off."

She couldn't stand to look at him, not with her in his eyes.

"I didn't write you off."

She didn't dare say more.

"Did you think it was me?"

It was likely her imagination getting the best of her, but in that moment Isobel felt her own heart beating from of her chest, thumping against her ribcage so strong and so loudly that it felt like it would fall out at if she turned to face him.

* * *

The next morning, Isobel replayed what she imagined would be her last conversation she ever had with Albus Potter in her mind, almost like a scene from a film on loop, flashing in front of her eyes so she could hardly stand to think of anything else.

As she rolled and sifted from side to side, she glazed over the details, unsure sure she could bear to rethink the entirety of the conversation, much less have another one like that with anyone, much less him, ever again.

 _"Did you think it was me?"_

She thought of Cornelia more in the last few hours than she had in the last three years.

 _"Do you think... I had something to do with it?"_

If Albus had asked her what she thought happened to Cornelia back when they were twelve or thirteen, and if she had been honest with him, she'd likely say yes. She thought of him, of what she knew.

Now, she'd tell him to let it go.

She should've told him to let it go.

It wasn't until Adeline, her laziest dorm mate, got up and stumbled to the bathroom that she realized she'd wasted half of her morning thinking of Albus Potter and Cornelia Bolero and started rifling through her trunk for a t-shirt and some sweatpants to wear to the library.

The last words she said to him before rushing out last night ran through her head while she got dressed and waited for Adeline to brush her teeth and wash her face.

 _"Didn't you think it was me?"_

* * *

Cornelia was a dreamer. That's what Amadeus Wayland would've told his daughter, had he ever met her.

Not many people knew Cornelia well, not like Isobel and Albus liked to think they did, although many may argue that there are only so many ways you could possibly know a person at the age of eleven.

Some days she wanted to be a pirate. The modern version of a pirate, that is, not the eyepatch-wearing, tooth-missing version. A sailor who took life day by day and slept to the sway of a ship. Other days, she'd tell her two closest friends about flying up by the goalposts in a Quidditch game (not that she'd ever been on a broom herself) or running so far away she'd never be able to find her way back, even if she wanted to.

Cornelia liked to dream, and when she told her stories, Isobel and Albus couldn't help but dream too.

* * *

 _The Wayward Rememberer_

 _by Cornelia E. J. Bolero_

 _14 October 2017_

 _Jimmy Patten, what hope did he ever have?_

 _Him and his brother too, Andy Patten,_

 _they rode the wayward trails_

 _The wayward rememberer_

 _and his books of all that he had ever heard._

 _All those words_

 _Filled him up_

 _The nights he never wanted to forget_

 _and the days he dreamed of one day living._

 _The brothers that grew and grew and grew_

 _'Tii one day they burst and felt brand new._

 _They should've stuck to cherishing the nights when it felt alright_

 _For the hearts that yearned to burn with them_

 _For the ones who might forget them slower._

* * *

A/N: I'm not sure how I feel about this chapter, or the 180° turn I've found myself taking in planning this story (in my head, mostly) over the last few months, but I thought I'd put this up for the hell of it and cringe over any edits I need to make later. Regardless, a couple people may stumble on this story and likely not even reach this far, but in case anyone has: thank you for stopping by. :)

Next up, IV: ...But I Just Had to Inch a Little Closer.


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